TNT Celebrates Zion Williamson’s NBA Debut With Epic Thanos Crossover

NBA fans had been waiting for number one overall pick Zion Williamson to take the court for months and they finally got to see him in action on Wednesday night. TNT unleashed a little Avengers love for the rookie’s debut performance including his favorite character from the movie. Thanos is a lot of Marvel fans’ favorite villain, but the normally cheerful Pelican forward mentioned that fact about himself in an earlier interview. Williamson absolutely took over the game in the 4th Quarter while a raucous New Orleans crowd drowned out the action. He hit four threes to go perfect from beyond the arc in a sequence where he scored 18 straight points for The Big Easy ball club. ESPN’s coverage of the game was heavily focused on the Duke product’s debut and it looks like everybody got what they came for after that outburst near the end of the game.

So many fans seem to really like the Mad Titan. On the director commentary for the home release of Infinity War, co-director Anthony Russo talked about the creative team’s decision to carve some inherent nobility in Thanos’ cause during Infinity War.

“That’s I think, one of the most unnerving things about Thanos, is that there is a nobility in him, you know? It’s not ego, it’s not power,” Russo said. “He basically looks at himself as a servant and when he’s finished with his service, he rests.”

Comicbook.com also spoke to Matt Aitken from Weta Digital about Thanos’ different approach in Endgame.

“He is kind of like a slightly different character,” Aitken clarified. “But we did use the same base assets for both films. We spent a lot of time, obviously, on Infinity War working Thanos up. But then the Thanos that we see in Endgame is a younger Thanos. He’s come forward from 2014, so he’s… technically, I think he’s like four years younger than the Thanos of Infinity War. He’s more agile. He’s kind of at the peak of his physical prowess. And he’s also clothed differently. He’s wearing the armor. He’s in battle mode. We did the sequences on Titan for Infinity War where he was kind of dressed much more casually, and he’s more philosophical in those. So we had that work to do to kind of redress him in the armor. We wanted to reflect his youth and his power, mainly through animation. So that’s not so much a change that we make to the base asset, but it is a change that we make to the approach on how we’re animating him.”

Photo Credit: Derick E. Hingle-USA TODAY Sports